Loss Prevention Editing and Proofreading Services

A loss prevention officer detains a customer at the door and writes an incident report stating the subject concealed merchandise and exited without payment. In the wrongful detention suit that follows, the officer is asked at deposition where the subject was when the concealment was observed, whether the subject was kept under continuous observation from that point to the door, and whether the officer saw the subject pass an open register. The report addresses none of the three, and the store settles.

We edit what loss prevention teams produce — incident and apprehension reports, civil demand and restitution correspondence, shrink analysis and investigation summaries, CCTV review logs and evidence documentation, internal theft investigation reports and interview summaries, loss prevention policy and detention procedure manuals, awareness and training materials for store staff, vendor and supply chain loss assessments, and reporting formats for law enforcement referral. Our editors work on the report that becomes the store's whole account of a detention.

The apprehension report is the store's only contemporaneous record of a detention that may be litigated for years, and its failure is a conclusion about theft written in place of the specific observations that would support one. We work through these so the observation is recorded as a sequence with the officer's position at each point — where the subject was, where the officer was, what was visible from there — rather than compressed into concealed merchandise, which states the finding and omits everything that establishes it; so continuous observation is addressed explicitly, including any moment it was broken and for how long, given that a gap in surveillance is the first thing a wrongful detention claim examines and its absence from a report is read as a gap concealed rather than a gap that did not occur; so the point of payment the subject passed is identified specifically, since the whole basis of the detention rests on the subject having had an opportunity to pay and not taken it; so what the officer personally saw is kept separate from what was later confirmed on CCTV or told to them by another employee, because a report blending direct observation with secondhand information cannot be defended as either; and so the exact words used in the initial approach are recorded as spoken, given that the detention's lawfulness frequently turns on what was actually said in the first ten seconds. Reports written this way survive a deposition years later.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including incident records, investigation materials and store information. We are editors rather than loss prevention professionals, investigators or lawyers, and we offer no view on detention decisions, procedures or legal standards. What we can do is make sure the report records the observation, not the conclusion.